Master the Tenable Cloud Security Maturity Model for your organization

Key takeaways

• Assess your organization’s current maturity level across critical cloud security domains.
• Define a clear end-state to align stakeholders and justify security budgets.
• Execute a step-by-step path from reactive “firefighting” to preemptive, automated exposure management.

Tenable Cloud Security Maturity Model: Vision, path and execution

As your cloud environments become more dynamic, grow in complexity, and scale quickly, you might find it hard to identify a viable cybersecurity solution that grows with you.

You need more than just tools; you need a strategy. This is where the Tenable Cloud Security Maturity Model becomes essential. It provides the framework you need to move beyond reactive firefighting and build a preemptive, resilient security posture. By following our model’s "Vision, Path, Execution" methodology, you can assess where you stand today and chart a clear course toward reducing cloud security risks by following these four stages:

1. Qualify: Assess where your organization stands today.
2. Set milestones: Decide how to move forward.
3. Execute: Set clear, measurable goals, select stakeholders, establish delivery timetables, and carry out the roadmap.
4. Repeat: Evaluate the results of the execution, make necessary adjustments, and repeat the process.

• Download the white paper “Cloud Security Maturity Model: Vision, path, execution”

Define your vision and assess your reality

The first step in building your cloud security strategy is understanding your starting point. Many organizations struggle with "unknown unknowns" in their cloud infrastructure because they lack a structured way to measure their effectiveness. 

A robust maturity model allows you to assess the current level of your organization’s maturity in each of the crucial domains of cloud security:

• Organization
  • People
    • Roles and responsibilities
    • Training
  • Processes
    • Remediation process
    • Integration to CI/CD pipeline
    • Compliance
    • Access governance
    • Incident response
• Technology
  • Visibility
    • Inventory management
    • Contextualization
  • Prevention
    • Identities
    • Entitlements
    • Data
    • Computing
    • Network access
  • Detection
    • Log collection
    • Log analysis

For each one of these domains, the white paper guides you in assessing your organization’s level of cloud security maturity: 

• Ad hoc: Reactive and unstructured
• Opportunistic: Basic level of structure and strategy
• Repeatable: Replicable and executable strategy
• Automated and integrated: Automatic strategy application

Whether you are struggling with basic visibility or looking to optimize an established program, benchmarking your current state allows you to set clear and actionable cloud security goals. This process helps you answer critical questions about your cloud security operation:

• Are you merely reacting to cloud threats, or are you proactively managing exposure before attacks occur?
• Do you have unified visibility across your entire cloud attack surface, including identity, compute, and storage?
• Is your team equipped to handle the speed of modern cloud development, or are they slowing down innovation?

By defining a clear vision, you create a target that aligns your security operations with business objectives. This strategic alignment is crucial for helping you secure the budget and executive buy-in required for long-term success.

The path to proactive cloud security

Once you have assessed your current level, you need a path to improvement. Moving from a reactive state to an optimized one requires addressing key pillars of cloud security, including identity management, workload protection. and network security.

This journey is rarely linear, but a structured model helps you prioritize your efforts. Instead of trying to fix everything at once, you can focus on the specific "next steps" that will yield the greatest risk reduction for your specific environment. 

For example, you might start by gaining visibility into your assets. Once that is achieved, the next step on the path is to secure the configurations of those assets. From there, you move toward predictive risk analysis. 

Effective cloud security also requires integrating security checks into your DevOps pipelines. By shifting left, you ensure that cloud infrastructure is secure by design, reducing the burden on your security teams later. 

Whether you are focused on cloud vulnerability management or securing cloud identities, the maturity model provides the context for how to unify all aspects of cloud security to reduce your overall exposure.

For a deeper dive into how a unified approach supports this journey, explore the Tenable Cloud Security cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP), which is designed to support you at every stage of maturity.

• Assess your cloud security maturity now

Executing your strategy with the right tools

To reach the highest level of maturity, you must eliminate silos. Point solutions often leave gaps that attackers exploit. A comprehensive approach, such as that offered by Tenable Cloud Security, part of the Tenable One Exposure Management Platform, brings together data from across your IT and cloud environments. This visibility allows you to prioritize exposure based on actual risk, ensuring your team focuses on what matters most.

Why you need a maturity model now

Cloud environments are dynamic and scale quickly, making them uniquely challenging to secure. Without a defined maturity model, your security efforts can become fragmented and inefficient, leading to wasted budget and increased risk.

Adopting this framework gives you a "common language" to speak with stakeholders. It shifts the conversation from technical details to strategic progress. You can demonstrate exactly how investments in solutions like Tenable Cloud Security move the needle from an immature "ad hoc" approach to fully mature “automated and integrated” process.

This clarity is essential for transforming security from a cost center into a business enabler.

• Get the step-by-step maturity roadmap

Frequently asked questions

What is the Tenable Cloud Security Maturity Model?

The Tenable Cloud Security Maturity Model is a strategic framework that benchmarks your organization’s cloud security posture to define a roadmap for proactive cloud exposure management. It helps security leaders assess their current capabilities, identify gaps in their cloud defenses, and create a plan to grow the organization’s cloud security maturity level.

What are the key steps in the maturity journey?

The journey follows a "Vision, Path, Execution" methodology. You first define your "Vision" (where you want to be), map the "Path" (the specific steps to get there), and then "Execute" using the right technology and processes. The path typically involves moving through stages of assessing your baseline, setting your vision, mapping the path, and executing the strategy.

Why is a cloud security maturity model important?

Cloud environments are dynamic and scale quickly, often outpacing traditional security measures. A maturity model provides a structured approach to managing this complexity, helping you justify budgets and demonstrate progress to executive stakeholders. It allows you to set clear and actionable security goals based on your specific business needs.

• Read the full white paper